IMS Productions employs a Spectra Logic BlackPearl Converged Storage System with Avid Interplay Production to store their most valuable assets

"We throw terabytes upon terabytes at the BlackPearl each day and I simply cannot bottleneck the system. The speed blows us away and it keeps us on our toes! In addition, the Spectra solution fits seamlessly into our current Avid environment and does not disrupt our editors’ workflow." - Dave Daniels, Editor/Supervisor Non-Linear at IMS Productions

About IMS Productions

IMS Productions’ (IMSP) Content Division and Mobile Production Group are located in Indianapolis, Indiana, just across the street from the iconic Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The organization is comprised of three distinct divisions: the Radio Division whose responsibility is to exploit radio rights and produce Indy Car radio broadcasts for 300+ affiliates nationwide, the Content Division that specializes in event and studio production, creative development and design, and strategic digital and web production and distribution and finally the Mobile Unit Group, who supplies state of the art remote broadcast facilities for numerous sports and entertainment clients. IMSP is also home to two sizable production studios equipped for small and large projects, from full set productions with studio audiences to single talent live shots, all with uplink capability.

The Challenge

IMS Productions’ (IMSP) Content Division and Mobile Production Group create numerous digital assets including video, audio and multimedia solutions. They generate more than 40TB of racing footage per year over the course of 16 racing weeks. Most of these large assets are managed by Avid Interplay | Production, which manages content creation, automates workflows and enables collaboration. Previously, once content had been edited, IMSP used middleware to move content off of Avid Nexis production storage to an Oracle® StorageTek® SL500 tape library with LTO-3 drives.

IMSP was in search of a modern open standard-based archive solution that would seamlessly integrate with their existing Avid environment, and required the ability to manage and protect creative assets outside of the Avid system (or non-Avid assets) such as still pictures, large video files, 4K and 8K raw camera files, etc. The system would need to accommodate the archive of IMSP’s non-digitized assets (such as film from 1911) and be able to house them for the next 5 to 10 years and beyond. It was necessary for the archive to scale in capacity at low predictable costs and break away from the traditional licensing models. Longevity, content integrity and speed of access were expectations of their creative team. In addition, IMSP needed a way to migrate footage off their HD Cams to use immediately in the field, while giving the editors instant access. Lastly,they needed the ability to run their new solution alongside their previous archive while legacy content was being migrated to a new generation of LTO tape technology (LTO-7).

The Solution

IMSP decided to replace their legacy middleware and tape library solution with a Spectra® BlackPearl® Converged Storage System and a Spectra® T200 Tape Library. The tight integration between BlackPearl and Avid Interplay | Production allowed IMSP to archive directly from their Avid environment to a mix of disk and tape, while employing LTFS open-standard. The organization was impressed with the ease-of use and the seamless integration between Interplay PAM and BlackPearl. With this solution, IMSP’s new video is ingested into Interplay PAM, edited on Nexis production storage, and stored via the Interplay PAM client for BlackPearl directly to the T200 tape library. This workflow is fast, simple and lowers network congestion.

“Our core mission at IMSP is to provide creative content and advanced technical solutions for our clients. We are dedicated to thefearless pursuit of excellence with our business partners.” - Rich Feinberg, SVP / Executive Producer at IMS Productions

IMSP also required an archive for their creative assets not managed by Avid. The organization utilized the BlackPearl® Eon Browser, a no-charge client (application) from Spectra. The Eon Browser facilitates the transfer and storage management of IMSP’s creative assets to a second partition on their Spectra T200 tape library with a simple drag-and-drop interface. This provided IMSP a clear path to store their creative assets that previously sat on a disk subsystem and were exposed to potential loss. The tightly integrated solution between Avid Interplay | Production and BlackPearl has allowed IMS Productions to simply and affordably store not only their Avid assets, but also their creative assets, in one easy-to-use workflow.

Spectra BlackPearl Converged Storage System – BlackPearl was designed to provide a simple portal to a multi-tier storage architecture and to break away from traditional and legacy solutions that are based on licensing models, driving greater cost when scaling. Designed for organizations where content and long-term integrity is at the core of their business, BlackPearl allows data to move seamlessly to disk and tape storage, in a way not previously possible.BlackPearl enables users to deploy tiers of storage, even cloud, that are cost effective, easy to manage and scalable to exabytes of data. BlackPearl’s simpleRESTful API and integrated advanced bucket management (ABM) retains and manages organization’s assets forever at costs as low as pennies per gigabyte.

Spectra T200 - Designed to meet the performance backup and archive requirements of the most demanding small and medium-sized organizations, the Spectra T200 library is easy to use, manage, and maintain. The T200 also integrates with Spectra’s BlackPearl, enabling users to easily store massive amounts of data forever at significantly less costs. Scalable from 50 to 200 slots, users can store over 1.2PB (3PB compressed) of data in this library. Equipped with the ability to use up to 8 LTO drives, users can transfer data up to 8.6 TB/hr. (21.6 TB/hr. compressed) in a 20U form factor